Red Hat: Yes, Windows 8 Machines Will Run Linux

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Red Hat: Yes, Windows 8 Machines Will Run Linux

Red Hat has moved to ease fears that the new secure boot mechanism included in Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 operating system will make it overly difficult to also install Linux on Windows 8 machines.

In a blog post, Red Hat vice president of engineering Tim Burke sought to reassure Linux lovers that they will be free to install various versions of the open source OS alongside Windows 8 – despite Microsoft's introduction of a new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) for ensuring the integrity of an operating system when it boots up.

"A major shortcoming of the initial UEFI secure boot implementation was the lack of easy to use accommodations for operating systems other than Microsoft Windows, including the many variants of Linux," Burke writes. "Red Hat has worked for many months, in conjunction with industry consortium The Linux Foundation, hardware partners, and Microsoft to collaboratively develop a UEFI secure boot mechanism that allows user/customer choice and ease of use."

UEFI is essentially a way for a machine's embedded software – known as firmware – to talk to a booting operating system in an effort to ensure security. "This is important because there have increasingly been real-world exploits where fraudulently modified early boot code has introduced vulnerabilities into the operating system," Burke says.

But when Microsoft first introduced the technology, many Linux advocates said it would prevent users from installing Linux on Windows machines. Some users and companies will purchase Windows machines and then replace Microsoft's OS with Linux, while others run multiple OSes on machines.

Burke's blog post is likely a response to another recent post from Red Hat employee Matthew Garrett, who covered similar ground but still voiced concerns over the current UEFI setup. "This isn't an attractive solution, but it is a workable one," he wrote. "We came to the conclusion that every other approach was unworkable. The cause of free software isn't furthered by making it difficult or impossible for unskilled users to run Linux, and while this approach does have its downsides, it does also avoid us ending up where we were in the 90s."

Basically, UEFI requires a set of encryption keys that ensure trust between an OS and a system's firmware. The problem is that if you want to run multiple operating systems, you have to have multiple sets of keys. What Red Hat and others have done is arrange for outside OS makers to distribute keys to firmware makers through Microsoft's existing mechanisms. "This obviates the need for every customer to have to round up a collection of keys for multiple operating systems and device drivers," Burke says.

Microsoft will provide keys for Windows 8. Red Hat will provide keys for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Fedora distribution. Then, according to Burke, other Linux makers can sign up to use the Microsoft's key signing and registry services of a cost of $99. This fee will not go to Microsoft.

"Some conspiracy theorists bristle at the thought of Red Hat and other Linux distributions using a Microsoft initiated key registration scheme. Suffice it to say that Red Hat would not have endorsed this model if we were not comfortable that it is a good-faith initiative," Burke writes.

Once the sworn enemy of open source software, Microsoft has spent the last few years trying to change this image. It has embraced such big name open source projects as Hadoop and Node.js, and it is now on the list of the top contributors to Linux, as it seeks to ensure that its own tools work in tandem with the open source OS.